Harmony Korine

Harmony Korine was born on January 4, 1973, in Bolinas, California, and grew up largely in Nashville, Tennessee, where he attended Hillsboro Comprehensive High School. After finishing high school he moved to New York City to live with his grandmother, and enrolled at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, studying dramatic writing, for approximately one semester before dropping out without a degree. In New York he met the photographer Larry Clark, and at nineteen wrote the screenplay for Clark's 1995 film Kids.

Korine's own directing career began with Gummo (1997) and continued with Julien Donkey-Boy (1999), Mister Lonely (2007), Trash Humpers (2009), Spring Breakers (2012), and The Beach Bum (2019). Alongside filmmaking he developed a visual art practice spanning painting, photography, and collage, exhibiting at institutions including S.M.A.K. in Ghent (2000), Vanderbilt University Fine Arts Gallery in Nashville (2009), the Frist Art Museum in Nashville (2016), and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2017). He previously showed with Gagosian galleries, then moved his representation to Hauser & Wirth in 2023, debuting with the gallery in West Hollywood. That same year he founded the creative studio EDGLRD and released the digitally driven film Aggro Dr1ft. He continues to work across film and visual art; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, opened his first US museum survey, Harmony Korine: Perfect Nonsense, in April 2026.

Critical attention to Korine has tracked his film career closely. His early features, especially Gummo, drew a cluster of festival recognition in the late 1990s, including a Special Jury Award at the Gijon International Film Festival, an honorable mention at the Venice Film Festival, an Open Palm Award nomination at the Gotham Awards, and the KNF Award at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. IMDb credits him with twelve wins and fifteen nominations across his career overall. As his gallery and museum profile has grown, writing about his paintings, photographs, and collages has tended to extend the same framing long applied to his films, that of an artist whose restless, subculture-steeped sensibility resists easy categorization.

Korine's art market is small and still forming relative to his cultural profile. His primary market runs through Hauser & Wirth, which he joined in 2023 after previously showing with Gagosian galleries. The most substantial known holding of his work is the agnes b. collection in Paris, described by the collector and her foundation as the largest collection of Korine's work in the world, assembled since 1997 and shown in a dedicated exhibition at La Fab. from late 2024 into 2025. On the secondary market, the best-documented result located is Clif Note Check, which sold for USD 112,500 against a USD 60,000 to 80,000 estimate at Phillips in New York on February 28, 2017. A second confirmed sale, Starburst Wooly, sold for USD 50,000 at Phillips in New York on February 8, 2018. These two Phillips results are the clearest data points available and should be read as the extent of the confirmed public record rather than a complete or settled auction history.

Korine's visual art market is genuinely early stage. There is no catalogue raisonne, no established authentication program beyond the artist's studio and current gallery, and only a small number of public auction results to benchmark against. His 2023 move from Gagosian to Hauser & Wirth, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami's 2026 survey of more than fifty works across his career, are the clearest signals of institutional momentum, but they have not yet produced a deep or consistent secondary market. Collectors should treat the two documented Phillips sales, Clif Note Check at USD 112,500 in 2017 and Starburst Wooly at USD 50,000 in 2018, as thin evidence rather than a stable price benchmark, and should expect that provenance and gallery verification will matter more here than for artists with an established sale history.